Elon Musk’s Ambani ragebait meant to influence relevance into Starlink artificially

Households that cannot reliably afford mobile data or a basic smartphone are unlikely to absorb a multi-thousand-rupee hardware kit plus a monthly fee several times higher than existing alternatives.

Elon Musk’s tirade against the Government of India and Mukesh Ambani has proven again why he is truly the most diabolical individuals of our time. His latest series of posts on X calling Mukesh Ambani the “real boss of India,” sarcastically addressing him as “Dear Prime Minister Ambani,” accusing “certain oligarchs” of maintaining a “monopolistic chokehold,” and sharing reports on Reliance-linked political donations to the BJP, has done exactly what his earlier provocations did. It has yanked a niche commercial dispute into the centre of Indian public discourse and given Starlink free global publicity.

This is not a new tactic but in fact the same ragebait formula Musk has refined for years on the platform that he now owns.

The most transparent earlier version was Dogecoin. A joke cryptocurrency with no serious utility was elevated by a stream of Musk tweets (“Dogecoin might be my fav cryptocurrency,” “the people’s crypto,” and the rest). The price rose from fractions of a cent to an all-time high near $0.74 in May 2021; the market capitalization briefly exceeded $80 billion. Retail investors piled in. A subsequent lawsuit alleging a pyramid scheme was dismissed by a U.S. judge who called the tweets “aspirational and puffery.” Musk has never disclosed precise personal holdings or profits. Estimates circulating at the time, based on the scale of the move he helped engineer and allegations that he or entities close to him held material positions, put potential gains in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Whether the exact figure was lower or higher is secondary. The mechanism worked. Attention was manufactured, price was inflated, and the promoter benefited.

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A more recent example, one that many observers regard as substantively justified rather than purely commercial, was his amplification of the UK’s grooming-gang scandals. Long-documented cases involving organized sexual exploitation of mostly white working-class girls by predominantly Pakistani-heritage networks had been downplayed for years by authorities and media. Musk’s posts forced the topic back into mainstream discussion, prompting official inquiries and public reckoning. The same platform dynamics applied: a single high-visibility account could reanimate a subject that institutional caution had kept muted.